America’s New Authoritarianism - What to know and How to Resist.

Ted Bonnitt00:00:00

Today we have everything you wanted to know about authoritarianism but were afraid to ask. Is the US becoming an authoritarian state? And what are the psychological consequences for American citizens? Our guest is Edward Dunbar.He's a UCLA psychology professor and leading expert on authoritarianism and the author of the science based book the Psychology of Authoritarian Strongmen, Crooks and Celebrities that says it All. Welcome to the show.

Edward Dunbar00:00:29

Yeah, thank you.

Ted Bonnitt00:00:30

You are also a leading HA crimes researcher and you've written extensively on clinical evaluation of racism, victimology, intergroup relations.You've consulted the LAPD and the LA Unified School District and the LA Gay and Lesbian center in the areas of hate crime, offender evaluation and violence prevention in the schools. You've edited a book series on hate crimes called Hate unleashed on the 2016 US presidential election.And you're the co editor of the series the New Authoritarianism. So I think it's safe to say you are the right man to be speaking to about authoritarianism.

Phil Proctor00:01:05

And this is mandatory listening.

Ted Bonnitt00:01:07

May I remind you, what is an autocracy?

Edward Dunbar00:01:10

Well, it's a form of government for sure, but it's a way of living your life where you know that you don't have a voice. And most Americans would say that's very uncomfortable.I know people who lived in other societies, other cultures and they would say it's no big thing. It's just somebody decides everything for you and you learn to adjust to it. So for us as Americans.And I'll share one of my more unfortunate realities is about two, two and a half years ago I was at the White House doing a presentation about hate crimes, right? And I looked at the group and I said, you know, and I'd just been doing some research on what are the cultural factors affecting autocracy.And I said, well, you know, countries that have lower respect for leadership, where you can go up and talk to the leader, countries where you can be an individual, countries with a higher need for hedon pursuit, those are not countries that are going to become autocracies. So I said, I wouldn't worry too much folks, because that's not in our DNA. Well, obviously some other things have happened.It's not in our DNA, but it's an interesting reality to say we are now facing the kind of control of our individual lives in a way that is really unprecedented and it may cut against our DNA, but we are now really all stuck. Kind of as the British would say, we're in a muddle. What are we going to do given this doesn't really reflect us.And as the polling Data shows most of us are really not terribly excited about it. Now I say that and then I also think back to the Nazis.As long as they were doing polling, only got about 37, 38% of the popular support in their own country, as they were, they were governing. So you know, autocracy doesn't mean it's the majority at all. It just means that there's the powerful few that control the many.And we're kind of in that, that situation right now.

Ted Bonnitt00:02:58

But there's been a trend towards authoritarianism globally.The economist Democracy Index in 20 reported that 39% of the world's population lives under authoritarian governance, with an additional 15% of the world's population residing in hybrid regimes.

Edward Dunbar00:03:14

Right.

Ted Bonnitt00:03:14

You gave a wonderful presentation recently at the Santa Monica Library, of all places. Yeah, it was fantastic. The turnout was great.

Edward Dunbar00:03:20

It was great.

Ted Bonnitt00:03:20

People are very interested in this. And you showed a slide that said somewhere in America a little girl is hiding in an attic writing about ice.

Edward Dunbar00:03:28

Yeah. Sort of reference back to Anne Frank, of course, in the Holocaust.

Ted Bonnitt00:03:32

Is it really happening here?

Edward Dunbar00:03:34

We are there and like any social system, it is fluid and in our case we are moving into or sort of transitioning into a form of non democratic governance. And what follows from that are things such as corruption. Also unfortunately, increase in genocide risk.Now you mentioned some of the data about these organizations have been tracking international political trends using that same data. If you look at the idea of the risk for a state run genocide, what do we know?Hard autocracies are far more likely to perpetrate genocide against their own people. Hard autocracies are also much more likely to be extremely corrupt politically.Now what's the kicker is that hard autocracies and the true real democracies do about the same as far as their gross domestic product. So you got this kind of like you effect where any countries that are in between, you know, don't mess with Mr.In between you say seeing some economic lag, but if you go really very democratic or very authoritarian, you're about at the same level. Now the trade off is if you're doing that in an authoritarian regime.And this is the psychology of the thing, you know, that you're looking at a greater risk that your uncle can be taken away in the middle of the night. You're looking at the likelihood that you're going to have to pay back Sheesh. To get something done at the dmv.And you're also thrust into the reality that you can't feel really good about being part of the country. That you're in. So it's really interesting. The people that live in autocracy, they don't feel good about their societies.They have to find ways to feel good about themselves, independent of the culture and the group that they're part of. Democracies. It's kind of a pretty good correlation.Your subjective sense of well being is related to the degree of democratic reality of your social system. So you see a real split.I mean, from a psychological standpoint, from a welfare standpoint, clearly there are advantages for the average person to be living in a free, democratic regime. That's according to data cold from 2024. But we're not doing that, are we?So there must be something else that's going on, and that is, obviously there's some people that know they will benefit by living in a society in which the idea of freedom of speech, of press, of motion is restricted. In fact, I'll give you, I think, my favorite definition of oppression. It comes from a very, very wise old black psychiatrist named Chester Pierce.And he said, you know, you're being oppressed when somebody's controlling your space, time, energy or motion. He called it stem space, time, energy or motion. And when you think about it, you know, we're putting people in facilities.We are terrifying people to go out into the streets.As we know, in Los Angeles, one of the better things we've done is to find ways to get food to people that don't feel safe going to their corner stores.

Ted Bonnitt00:06:24

Right?

Edward Dunbar00:06:25

So we're seeing oppression, we're experiencing oppression. It's one of those things, the body feels it. You don't need the head to be there. Fear when you feel it.And that's what we're experiencing now, as are countless millions of people across the globe.

Phil Proctor00:06:37

I think in a way, we're also living in a state of hypocrisy because there's so much denial of all of this, so much misdirection, so much distraction.

Ted Bonnitt00:06:47

People resist change, right. They don't want to admit to themselves that this is happening.

Edward Dunbar00:06:51

It's a little bit like the frog in the boiling water bit. It's also interesting when you look at the idea, and I should say this, what are the downsides of living in a regime that really is state controlled?I used to study Russian for a while. In fact, I actually got recruited by the CIA. Yeah, I talked to some people that worked in the Soviet military after the fall of that regime.And one of them said to me, you had nothing to worry about with us because we were all drunk. And what it meant was, you know, we didn't like this either. You became a Communist because it was good for your career.

Ted Bonnitt00:07:26

Yep.

Edward Dunbar00:07:27

I was in Eastern Europe right after the fall of a lot of those quasi Soviet states.And it was really interesting because one of the things that struck me, there was no customer service because nobody cared, because nobody expected that it mattered what they were doing.It was also really interesting because if you talk to people even who are intellectuals, they wouldn't say anything about what they were thinking or doing. So they had learned to curb their own ideology, their own thoughts, their own creativity.Because the Stasi in eastern Germany had one out of every six people being in a police. Yeah, absolutely. And that's the risk of what you see when you get into a place like that.Now, psychologically, you also see that people develop what's called a learned helplessness, which is, it doesn't matter if I report this to the police, it doesn't matter if there's something wrong with my neighbor.

Phil Proctor00:08:16

In Russian, secret police is Tinia police. Tiny police. They're everywhere. You don't notice them anymore.

Edward Dunbar00:08:23

Well, the other thing that's also relevant to that exactly is, and this is again from another guy who was the Russian military, he said to me, well, if you want to know what's not true, you read Pravda. Pravda means truth.

Phil Proctor00:08:35

That's right.

Edward Dunbar00:08:36

So what you want to know is, what's the big lie? Well, just read it in the newspapers.

Ted Bonnitt00:08:40

The thing that baffles me is that through all of this horror that we're experiencing in the last year, and it's relentless, is the stock market keeps breaking records. They keep saying, well, the stock market's not really a barometer of the economy. Really.Okay, so that's how detached the wealth class is now from the everyday living experiences in America. And then you find out that authoritarianism is good for the gdp. And here we have Trump destroying the EPA regulations, withdrawing from the who.

Edward Dunbar00:09:12

Absolutely.

Ted Bonnitt00:09:12

There seems to be financial incentive.

Edward Dunbar00:09:14

Absolutely.In a way, what Trump is doing is what a lot of people who look at international government and private sector decision making has said for decades, which is, Americans are very next quarter oriented, they're very short term. You look at China, they are long term in their orientation.So, yeah, getting rid of regulations means that you're going to see more profit for corporations. Getting rid of consumer protection means you're going to see easier ways to produce goods that are going to be less safe and reliable.But that's all in the short term.And again, one of the things sort of the reasons to be cheerful moment is a very brilliant old psychologist, Bob Altemar, who spent his entire life studying authoritarianism, said very pointedly, you let authoritarian run something, they'll run it into the ground. And that's what we see. Corruption means that somebody's benefit benefiting somebody else, not me, as the old song goes. Right, that's the problem.Yeah, some people are doing very well with this and they're doing very well with this in the short term.I remember a colleague of mine who's an economist from Colombia and she looked at me about 10 years ago and said, you think people are going to put up with this forever? They won't. And she was saying, we didn't see it in our country.At some point things are going to shift, but nobody's worrying about what's going to happen in three years or five years. We're looking at next quarter. And yeah, the markets are up right now. Is this a sustainable system? That's really questionable.

Ted Bonnitt00:10:41

But Peter Thiel, who's a tech oligarch, has said that democracy is not compatible with capitalism.

Edward Dunbar00:10:49

Absolutely, that's an argument that's been made because the thing that's really messy about democracies is you vote regimes in and you vote them out.And if you're trying to develop a long term market plan, you don't want people coming in and saying, well actually we do want environmental regulations. To me and I kind of talk about like the new authoritarianism, the thing that makes us different today.Here we are, you know, 2026, from let's say 1950, 1936 is really, really two critical things.Number one is technology, the ability to track, control, curate, create with AI false narratives in a level that, you know, would have been like a wet dream for Joseph Goebbels, you know, very, very clearly. But the other thing is environmental risk. And I think we're all playing with like house money on saying, well, what if we get it wrong?Well, what if we get it wrong about climate change? Well, what if we get it wrong about environmental regulations? We are now looking at the idea of like global consequences that cannot be isolated to.Well, one country screwed up, we all pay for it, it's going to affect all of us. That wasn't true half a century ago or 100 years ago. I think that's why we're now looking at a whole nother. Is it like old wine in a new bottle?Perhaps. But it's a dangerous new reality.

Ted Bonnitt00:12:07

We're with the surveillance capitalism that we're experiencing is huge opportunities for these people. You don't hear Bezos speaking up. He's paying $75 million bribes to Trump to curry favor and at the same time, gutting the Washington Post.

Edward Dunbar00:12:23

Yeah, when he bought the Washington Post, it was 1/2 of 1% of his total wealth at the time.

Ted Bonnitt00:12:29

You know, it was like a cup of coffee.

Edward Dunbar00:12:31

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's media capture. And that's the other thing.I mean, if you really want to look at what's going on with legacy media, you know, they've kind of tied themselves to this proposition as well. And I think as this falls apart, so will the idea of there being, like a common ground.Now, the problem with that is we're also getting into more of a Tower of Babel, where all that data is going to curate information that will only reinforce our biases. And that's a very dangerous psychological truth. I'll only understand things in terms of what I already believed in. It's like a.It's like jury decision making. Once I know you're guilty, it doesn't matter if you come in and say, we found the actual murderer. No, no, no, no. I already know who the.That's what we're gonna see with our political decision making.

Ted Bonnitt00:13:14

Confirmation bias.

Edward Dunbar00:13:15

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Phil Proctor00:13:16

You know, what you made me think about was Orson Welles and citizen Cain saying, I think it would be fun to run a newspaper.

Ted Bonnitt00:13:24

And speaking of Media captured, In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter.

Edward Dunbar00:13:28

Yes.

Ted Bonnitt00:13:29

And aggressively relaxed content oversight security. He terminated the technical staff who monitored the online content.

Edward Dunbar00:13:35

Right.

Ted Bonnitt00:13:36

FCC Chairman Brandon Carr announced he's investigating the TV show the View after the appearance of a Texas candidate, James Talarico. But cbs, now run by the Ellisons, they wouldn't allow him on Colbert's show. So that's media captured.Colbert, to his credit, spoke out about it on the show, and then did a YouTube only interview.

Edward Dunbar00:13:57

But, you know, think of it like this. It's like buying WorldCom stock and suddenly waking up one day and saying, it's worth 16 cents.Average American, at some point, as a behavioral scientist, is gonna look at Netflix. They're gonna look at CBS as being Pravda. They're gonna say, oh, this is all for show now. I don't take this stuff seriously.Now what I think the problem is not just maybe it won't be worth very much if you own those sources, but what's that gonna do to our decision making as a society? How are people gonna know what they should be buying, selling, working towards, if you know, it's all a lie. And I don't think I thought that through.

Ted Bonnitt00:14:33

Professor Ed Dunbar of UCLA is with us. Our guest today, an expert on authoritarianism.

Phil Proctor00:14:38

And the Firestine Theater.

Ted Bonnitt00:14:39

And the Firestine Theater.

Edward Dunbar00:14:40

Have a good day now.

Phil Proctor00:14:41

How did you get. Bus.

Edward Dunbar00:14:43

Oh, my goodness. Listening to the radio. Back to the radio. That's right. Yes. Yeah. Bose was on this bus. Yes, Right. Exactly. Exactly.

Phil Proctor00:14:52

Well, it's true. And the Firestine Theater was political.

Edward Dunbar00:14:55

Absolutely.

Phil Proctor00:14:56

At its time. And we were anti war and all of that stuff. And we got into some trouble for it as well.

Edward Dunbar00:15:02

Good trouble.

Phil Proctor00:15:03

But it was good trouble.

Edward Dunbar00:15:04

Good trouble. Yes.

Phil Proctor00:15:05

And that's where we are now. We're in a time where we have to. Yes. We have to resist.

Edward Dunbar00:15:11

Yes.

Phil Proctor00:15:12

It has to be good trouble.

Edward Dunbar00:15:13

Yes.

Phil Proctor00:15:14

We have to make our voices heard.

Ted Bonnitt00:15:16

You quoted poet Kenneth Patchen.

Phil Proctor00:15:18

Oh, yes.

Ted Bonnitt00:15:19

No one works alone.

Edward Dunbar00:15:20

Yes.

Ted Bonnitt00:15:21

I don't share my thoughts because I think it will change the minds of people who think differently. I share my thoughts to show people who already think like me that they're not alone.

Edward Dunbar00:15:30

Yeah. And that's what's so important, because there's more of us than there are them. But we are feeling frightened. We are hiding.We are sometimes even turning on each other because we're so fearful. It's also, you know, to paraphrase another song, do you know who your friends are?I know a couple of guys who are hate crime researchers who, right after Charlie Kirk was assassinated, basically said, well, you know, Kirk had some good ideas there, and he was a real leader of youth. And I was like, wait a minute, what are you getting at? And some people find the short line to go stand in.And the short line is where things are going to be easier in the future if this holds. So we kind of find out who our real friends are through this process. Who are the people you can really rely upon.And, you know, I like to put it this way, because this is, I think, one of the bigger questions that kind of you guys are, like, asking me about. And that is, how do you make sense of being in these crazy times?

Phil Proctor00:16:23

Absolutely.

Edward Dunbar00:16:23

Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Phil Proctor00:16:25

There are some great benefits to what's happening right now. RFK Jr. Has instructed us now as to what kind of vegetables we can insert into our rectums. Yeah. But we know we're a banana.

Ted Bonnitt00:16:37

Well, you know why that's a.

Phil Proctor00:16:38

When they say a firm banana, you know, it has to be a firm.

Ted Bonnitt00:16:42

Banana because the website has an AI component, which, of course, was contracted out to Elon Musk, who has no governor the usual suspects.

Edward Dunbar00:16:52

Right.

Ted Bonnitt00:16:52

That's why that question will be entertained.

Edward Dunbar00:16:55

It's like jokes about Uncle Joe and Russia, and, you know, people make fun of Putin, you know, in Moscow. And, you know, there was a time that Hitler was thought to be kind of a buffoon, you know.

Phil Proctor00:17:05

Yeah, that's right.

Edward Dunbar00:17:06

Yeah.

Phil Proctor00:17:07

Chaplin epitomized it so well, in the.

Ted Bonnitt00:17:09

Dictator, you write about how societies slip into authoritarianism.

Edward Dunbar00:17:13

Absolutely.

Ted Bonnitt00:17:14

And this is nothing new.

Edward Dunbar00:17:15

Nothing at all.

Ted Bonnitt00:17:16

As you wrote, there's nothing new under the sun. It goes back to Julius Caesar at least.

Edward Dunbar00:17:21

I mean, I think it goes back to the beginning of 2001, where you got the monkeys fighting over the water, and you got the two groups of monkeys, you know, fighting each other.It's the same idea, you know, and really, you can look at authoritarianism as I've always been around, but you can also look at really ancient societies that were clearly democratic. So we've always had this duality occurring, you know, always this kind of push and pull, this yin and yang kind of a thing.

Ted Bonnitt00:17:44

Von Hindenburg was in decline. Hitler took over.

Edward Dunbar00:17:47

Absolutely.

Ted Bonnitt00:17:48

Biden in decline.

Edward Dunbar00:17:50

The king with the march on Rome and saying, you know, I don't have it in me to fight back again.

Ted Bonnitt00:17:56

So Caesar comes to power.

Edward Dunbar00:17:57

Yeah, yeah. The Mensheviks, who didn't know what to do when they were given power after the tsar was taken away.You know, Robert Paxton, a real genius in the study of fascism, said, what do you know about fascism? You know, the government that was there before was weak and it wasn't able to defend itself. And I've been asked this.It's like, well, was Biden so weak? And my comment is he had three authoritarians elected, popularly elected. Duterte in the Philippines, Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Donald Trump in 2016.They were all voted out. There was an insurrection in Brazil. There was an insurrection in the United States. Duterte was just making a lot of noise.Nobody got him right away that way. The Brazilians put down their insurrection within about a week. He is now facing 27 years in prison.Duterte is now in the Hague, incarcerated for crimes against humanity, and our guy's back in power. So somebody missed the message here. Somebody didn't get the memo. And unfortunately, it's our society.If we had responded, like the Brazilian government, back to American exceptionalism, aren't we wonderful? Well, if we'd done the same thing as our neighbors down south, we're not having this conversation right now, which is extraordinary.

Ted Bonnitt00:19:14

What's interesting to me is the Epstein files and how definitive they are. They're bringing down monarchies and governments overseas,.

Edward Dunbar00:19:23

Healthcare researchers, and there's more of us than there are of them. That's the paradox. There are more people saying, I don't want this, even more people saying, I didn't vote for this.But we're still left with another dilemma about the American psyche, is that, as you both know, more people didn't vote for either candidate in the last major election than voted for either Harris or Trump. So we're left with this idea of a lack of energy, a lack of initiative. And I think that that's not by an accident.I think there has clearly been a lot of very bright boys and girls who've been working for a long time undermine our sense of democratic necessity. And I think that's part of what's now caught up with us.

Ted Bonnitt00:20:03

Dismantling the EPA pollution emissions standards and withdrawing from who. And all these people are dying that are not getting help. Now, why? Why would they do that? Well, again, it's because it's a profit motive, isn't it?

Edward Dunbar00:20:16

Well, it's a profit motive, but it's also the people that are in positions of political leadership are really, frankly, quite antisocial. And this is not just Trump, and it's not just today. You know, Stalin started out after he was beaten up by his dad for many years as a train robber.We have, you know, sort of, you know, Mao as more of a bandit than of a theoretician. You know, we've seen this for decades now.These are people that don't really have a lot of concerns about what it's going to do to the average individual. They never have. And if anything, I think because of extreme wealth, less so today than even a hundred years ago.

Ted Bonnitt00:20:52

In your book, you talk about this, the personal psychologies of authoritarianism, and a lot of it had to do with childhood privation and abuse.

Edward Dunbar00:20:59

Pretty awful.

Ted Bonnitt00:21:00

Saddam Hussein of Iraq, whose childhood was marked by an abusive stepfather who perpetrated chronic psychological and physical violence upon the family. Joseph Stalin, his father was exceedingly violent.

Edward Dunbar00:21:11

Exactly. Died in a bar fight.

Ted Bonnitt00:21:13

Idiom. His childhood was fraught with poverty, parental abandonment, exposure to violence of a ritualistic nature.Which might explain why he cannibalized his wife's heart.

Edward Dunbar00:21:23

Yes, on one hand. Or where Joe Stalin, years before he had formal power, said, my idea of fun is to sit around and think about who I'd like to kill tomorrow.

Ted Bonnitt00:21:31

What about the sheikh who was just thrown out of the big company? Guy. What was his name? Because he Wrote an email to Jeffrey Epstein saying, hey, it was great to see you. Sorry I missed you.Really enjoyed the torture videos.

Edward Dunbar00:21:43

Yeah, yeah.Well, this is where you put the autocrat on the couch and say, we are looking at some people that not just want a lot of money and want a lot of power, but have a very perverse idea about human relationships. And, you know, if I could sound a little prosaic for a moment, I think that the greatest tonic against authoritarianism is love. End of story.Because none of these people have good intimate relationships, have a love for their country, have a love for their people. So the real tonic to this is to know what you care about. Because they don't know that you talk.

Ted Bonnitt00:22:18

About Mussolini, Modi, Kim Jong, Un. They all have narcissistic personality disorder.

Edward Dunbar00:22:24

I'll put it this way.Yes, a lot of them show a lot of antisocial characteristics, and the narcissism is almost like maybe an antisocial kind of cleaned up, you know, or an antisocial in a nice suit. But, yeah, these are people, as I say, who have no compassion or connectivity.And ironically, we'll do the whole spiel about, you know, I'm here to bond and connect with my people. And, you know, they do that whole ultra nationalism. Really what I talk about is authoritarianism, ultra nationalism, and xenophobia.When you see those things coming together, bad stuff is gonna follow.

Phil Proctor00:22:59

Absolutely.

Edward Dunbar00:23:00

Yeah.

Ted Bonnitt00:23:00

These autocrats had, as you said, unstable relationship history. Mussolini, he had sexual issues. He was abusive to women.

Edward Dunbar00:23:07

Yes.

Ted Bonnitt00:23:08

Gaddafi also had a sexual compulsion that included frequent acts of violence to his female partners. Donald Trump, married three times, has been linked to porn stars.And more ominously, of course, his very close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and all the accusations about their pedophilia.

Edward Dunbar00:23:25

Absolutely.And that is making us have to rethink the idea that these people who got us here really are very problematic and that they're very, very notion of their governance is based on some very un American, unchristian ideas.

Ted Bonnitt00:23:40

Yeah, you talk about the four horsemen of autocracy.

Edward Dunbar00:23:44

So here are, like, the things when these start to kind of go to the wrong side, go to the dark side, if you want to put it that way. You know, you're in trouble. Okay, so number one is the lack of political choice, we say the lack of political plurality.Number two was the lack of there being any idea of being an alternate press or a free press. Number three is that there's really no idea, such as judicial independence or freedom.And then number four is the idea that there's really no real true elections. Now, again, I sit around and I run statistics on these sorts of things.And what is interesting is that in 2024, the predictor of a country not only being autocratic but also becoming increasingly likely to perpetrate genocide on its own citizens was the lack of the freedom of the press.And if you really want to talk about the idea of, like, a tipping hypothesis, I like, when do you go from being like a quasi democracy to sort of going down the rabbit hole? It's when any of those four things, when two of them have been lost, you're already, like, moving away from a true democratic reality. Okay.So, you know, there are warning signs.And I know, you know, Tim Snyder, who's a very, you know, area diet historian, he talks about, like, about 20 sort of phenomena and say all that makes sense. These four really tell you when your government in your society is no longer allowing you to have the rights of civil liberties and freedom.

Ted Bonnitt00:25:05

You talk about one of them being the politicized courts.

Edward Dunbar00:25:09

Oh, yeah.

Ted Bonnitt00:25:09

Like Hitler, the Trump regime has blatantly ignored court orders.

Edward Dunbar00:25:14

Yes, exactly.

Ted Bonnitt00:25:15

So they're lawless in that respect.

Edward Dunbar00:25:16

Right.

Ted Bonnitt00:25:17

But then the courts themselves have been degraded.Perfect example is Mitch McConnell, whose legacy will be denying the Supreme Court jurist by Barack Obama because he said six months wasn't enough time, and then he threw somebody in with a month to go.

Edward Dunbar00:25:30

Exactly.

Ted Bonnitt00:25:31

These coordinated efforts successfully reduce regulatory antitrust efforts. Koch brothers have put money into universities in return for curriculum changes. I think Harvard was the one university that refused that money.And guess who's being sued? Then you have these mental issues like, you talk about where Trump is so excessive that he's suing everybody because it's all he's ever done.And now he's suing himself. He's suing the US Government, and he won.

Edward Dunbar00:25:58

This is Firestein theater stuff.

Ted Bonnitt00:26:00

This really is, to me, the most consequential court decision.

Phil Proctor00:26:03

The other side of the record is.

Ted Bonnitt00:26:05

The Citizen United decision.

Edward Dunbar00:26:07

Oh, well, again, that was not an accident. That was part of a progression towards funding these kinds of initiatives. That's right. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, again, these are not random events.This was well planned and executed. There are a lot of bright boys and girls working against democracy, and that's what we gotta look at.In fact, you know, the challenge is to be on the left is that you can get kind of crazy. Somebody once wrote a book saying, racism makes you crazy. If you try and study it and deal with it, you start to lose perspective. Yeah.There are a lot of people that really have worked very hard to get us to this point. It's like they say in an AA group, your best thinking got you here.

Phil Proctor00:26:43

Now, are you actually still teaching classes?

Edward Dunbar00:26:47

Oh, no, I. I more just stare at doctoral students and tell them what they're doing wrong. It's much more refreshing, actually.

Phil Proctor00:26:53

Yeah.

Ted Bonnitt00:26:54

Yeah.

Phil Proctor00:26:54

A little autocratic.

Edward Dunbar00:26:55

Oh, absolutely. You didn't expect me to take this stuff seriously. Yeah.

Ted Bonnitt00:27:02

Let's talk about solutions. Do you think that overturning Citizens United, which would have to be a heavily Democratic Congress to do so.

Edward Dunbar00:27:09

Huge.

Ted Bonnitt00:27:09

If we got money out of politics. It was. Would neutralize these oligarchs, wouldn't it?

Edward Dunbar00:27:13

Okay, so, you know, how do I stay sane with this? Is the fact that I've looked at this for a long time. It doesn't shock me that we got here, unfortunately, to say that.But then I come back to my colleague Bob Altomare saying they'll screw it up. It really won't work.And you can see that with what the Nazis did with the Volkswagen that nobody ever got, which you can see with the five year plans with Stalin time and time again. Even China, the poster child for like state run economy, they got their problems. They got a lot more problems than we really hear.

Phil Proctor00:27:41

You were talking about funding of ICE. They offer you $50,000 and you don't get it.

Edward Dunbar00:27:47

Right.

Phil Proctor00:27:48

10, 10,000 A year. And if you drop out, you forfeit it all. You have to pay it back.

Edward Dunbar00:27:54

Yeah, right. You got to pay ICE back. Exactly.

Phil Proctor00:27:57

Pay no attention to man.

Ted Bonnitt00:27:58

But they are so well funded, they just put $100 million into concentration camps. Which is interesting because the right would always say how the deep state was.

Phil Proctor00:28:08

Take away our guns.

Edward Dunbar00:28:10

In psychology, we call that projection. The thing that I'm gonna do, I'm gonna say you're gonna do. So obvious.

Ted Bonnitt00:28:16

But there's a huge surge coming this way to California.

Edward Dunbar00:28:18

Yes, there is.

Ted Bonnitt00:28:19

It's not over. What would have happened if Minneapolis happened in the heat of summer? I think the chances of a peaceful reconciliation are dwindling.

Edward Dunbar00:28:27

There are certain people that don't want a peaceful reconciliation because that's a way of being able to get rid of the election. So we, you know, martial law. There's another way to look at that, and that is you see the galvanizing of the community.In Minnesota, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The community was nominated.

Ted Bonnitt00:28:46

Wow.

Edward Dunbar00:28:46

We may be looking at the same thing. And I know there's a whisper network here in Los Angeles for people that are undocumented. There are resources.I work with a group of mental health people around the globe to say, how do you deal with this and how do you sort of get through this? And it's a critical issue and your community is becoming stronger because we know what we're up against.

Ted Bonnitt00:29:07

You have something. I think we should leave with this. You have ways of coping. I'll just read the list and tell me what that means briefly. Going into silence.

Edward Dunbar00:29:14

Yeah, that is the person. And really there, I'm talking about the creative arts, the person who was the satirist, the person who was the musician.And I'm thinking of one person during the Second World War who just stopped working and just said, I can't do anything because I don't want to be a part of this. And if I did what I really wanted to do, just like what Stalin did with people like Prokofiev and Shostakovich, you could go to the death camp.So sometimes the creatives say, my only creative gesture is absolute elective mutism.

Ted Bonnitt00:29:46

Scott Galloway has been promoting this notion of unsubscribing.

Edward Dunbar00:29:50

Oh, I'm on the. I'm on board.

Ted Bonnitt00:29:51

Because when 70% of the economy is based on consumerism, it is our biggest vote.

Edward Dunbar00:29:55

Absolutely.

Ted Bonnitt00:29:57

Becoming a mad dog.

Edward Dunbar00:29:58

Oh, that's a very interesting example. And we may see that happen here, too, where people survive by becoming more extreme than the extreme extremists.I'm thinking of a gentleman I knew who was teaching history during the People's Revolution in China, and he said, my way of getting through this is to be more extreme than the Revolutionary Guard so that they won't suspect me. So you adopt this. But again, look at the falsehood we're creating.

Phil Proctor00:30:24

People are hypocrisy.

Edward Dunbar00:30:25

A narrative that I don't believe in for a moment. Exactly. Yeah.

Ted Bonnitt00:30:29

Meditating.

Edward Dunbar00:30:30

You know, I had a professor who was thrown into a Gulag because he was teaching history. Again, we come back to that. But he was. Wasn't using social realism. And I looked at this guy And I say, Dr. Nadell, how did you survive in the Gulag?He goes, I learned to meditate. He was the last guy in the world I would have ever thought I would have heard that from.

Ted Bonnitt00:30:50

So in safe settings, we can confront oppression. Sliding into autocracy is a social sleeping sickness. You will find out who your friends are. And in an insane world, we need a safe and smaller world.All words to live by. We are out of time. I can't believe it. We've been talking to Dr. Edward Dunbar, who's a leading expert on authoritarianism. Professor?

Phil Proctor00:31:10

Yeah.

Ted Bonnitt00:31:11

And keep your head down. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It's really, really great, folks. Keep hope alive and look for the young people to rebel against us.

Phil Proctor00:31:21

And that also means you, you old fart out there.

Ted Bonnitt00:31:24

Yeah, that's right. Sexy Boomer show. Catch all our stuff at our website, sexyboomershow.com.Reach out to us at infoexyboomershow.com we'd love to hear from you, what you want to hear, what you like, what you don't like, blah, blah, blah. We'll see you next week, God willing.